Spent $47 on a fancy capacitor tester and it totally let me down

I bought this high-end capacitor tester off Amazon thinking it would save me time on compressor calls, but the readings were all over the place and I ended up swapping a good part. Lost an hour on a service call in Toledo because I trusted it instead of my old multimeter. Anyone else had a tool that looked good but just didn't deliver?

3 comments

3 Comments

jasonf353h ago

My Klein meter did the same thing on a run capacitor last summer, had me chasing ghosts for 20 minutes before I grabbed my Fluke and it was fine. The problem is those cheap testers don't have proper filtering for real-world ripple and noise you get on compressor circuits. Stick with the old multimeter, those basic clamp meters have been proven reliable for decades.

davidkim1h ago

Totally agree with both of you jason and anna, cheap meters really do just make stuff up sometimes.

anna4912h ago

Oh man, that's gold. So what you're telling me is I should keep my $30 special in the drawer for checking if the lights are on and nothing else. I love how these cheap meters just pick up random noise like it's a free bonus feature. "Oh look, 48 volts on a dead circuit, must be ghosts." At least your Klein gave you a runaround for only 20 minutes. Mine decided to tell me a 5 uF cap was reading 22 uF, which is definitely a new level of creative writing. I swear they just built those things with a random number generator inside and called it a day.